Surry Siren System Needs Repair

Backup Adequate, Area Officials Say

June 16, 1995|By JUDI TULL Daily Press

SURRY — Virginia Power officials have declared the warning sirens for the Surry Nuclear Power Plant inoperable, and the sirens will remain that way until a problem that caused a total failure of the sirens during a test Wednesday is resolved.

James E. Norvelle, nuclear public affairs director for Virginia Power, said he did not know whether officials would even attempt to use the sirens if an emergency happened.

"I know that we're not relying on them," he said, "and we will not do so until we know why they failed and we can fix that."

The Nuclear Regulatory Agency was advised at 1:45 p.m. Wednesday that the sirens were inoperable, Norvelle said, and that status is unchanged even though the sirens finally blared at 3:30 Wednesday afternoon.

"We can notify people by route alerting and through the Emergency Broadcasting System if anything happens before we solve this problem," Norvelle said. Route alerting means that sheriff's deputies, State Police and volunteer emergency personnel would ride the roads with public-address systems, telling residents to turn on their radios for information. Norvelle said the backup meets NRC regulations for emergencies.

Surry County Administrator Terry Lewis said he is satisfied that the backup system protects area residents.

"I'm confident about the backup systems because these are our people, and they'll watch out for one another," Lewis said. Lewis added that Surry has 38 deputies and other law-enforcement personnel who could be dispatched to notify residents of any emergency. In addition, workers from other city departments would staff a telephone bank to call residents.

Workers evaluated the equipment in the three locations and had found only one technical problem, at the James City County sheriff's office, that could have led to Wednesday's siren failure. That system was sending an intermittent signal.

Norvelle said that he expected technicians to stop working around 7 p.m. Thursday and to begin again this morning at the Surry sheriff's office, James City County center and the state emergency operations center in Richmond to determine the source of Wednesday's problem.

Activation of the alarms is supposed to begin with a button at the Surry Sheriff's Department. When pushed, the button is supposed to send a signal over telephone lines to a radio transmitter at the power plant. The transmitter, in turn, sends signals to all 61 sirens, which should then sound.

None of the 61 sirens designed to alert area residents to a nuclear accident came on even after switches were thrown at the primary site in Surry and the two contingency locations.

"What is so frustrating," Norvelle said, "is that we have three separate locations, a primary and two backups, and each one failed. For all we know, the problem could be different at each site."

It took emergency officials about three hours on Wednesday to finally activate the sirens, all within a 10-mile radius of the Surry facility. The control panel at the Surry sheriff's office was replaced by Virginia Power workers and the circuits tested satisfactorily.

"At that point, we said, `Well, let's try it one more time,' " Norvelle said.

They pushed the button and the sirens wailed.

Norvelle said emergency officials were stunned at the system failure because all of the circuits had been tested successfully Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

In a test on Dec. 8, 1993, the siren activation from the Surry sheriff's office failed, but the James City County location was notified, and sirens were successfully activated, Norvelle said.

Although replacing the control panel seemed to solve the problem Wednesday, Norvelle cautioned that the cause still has not been determined.

"We don't really know that that was the problem. All we know is that we replaced the panel there and it worked," he said.

Wednesday's test was a "no-notice" drill, which is performed at Surry every other year, said Michael J. LaCivita, director of information with the Virginia Department of Emergency Services.

LaCivita was at the Innsbrook Technical Center in Glen Allen with Norvelle and other state and federal officials when the test began around 12:30 p.m. Since the specifics of the drill are unknown to most of the participants, Surry County Manager Terry Lewis said that, at first, he thought the siren failure was part of the exercise.

Norvelle said that it was about a half hour before authorities advised the localities that the siren failure was not part of the plan.

"It would not be unusual for someone to throw us a curveball like this," said Norvelle. "It adds a big dose of realism to the exercise."

The test is overseen and evaluated by representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to Ross Fredenburg, public information officer for the agency, it will take several weeks before a final report on the Surry test is made.

If the siren failure is determined to be a severe deficiency, the agency could require another exercise be run, Fredenburg said.